Strike From the Sky: The History of Battlefield Air Attack, 1910-1945

15. Battlefield Air Support in the East: The Case of Kursk

15 Battlefield Air Support in the East: The Case of Kursk When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he had every expectation of a quick victory. He had a honed military system benefiting from its experiences in the blitzkrieg. In contrast, the Soviets had done poorly in Finland, and Finland could be counted on to assist Nazi Germany when the invasion began. Further, Stalin's purges had devastated the Soviet military: 3 of 5 Marshals perished, as did 13 of 15 army commanders, 57 of 85 corps commanders, and llO of 195 division commanders. Then, there were the captive peoples, and large numbers of disaffected Soviet citizens, in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Ukraine. There were, however, a number of factors that mitigated against his success: the core of weakness of the Wehrmacht, already showing signs of being badly led and being overcommitted in an increasingly widening wari the vast geography of the SovietUnioni and, finally, the racial policies of the Third Reich itself. Subordinating common sense to racial ideology, the Nazi regime ruined for itself any chance of exploiting the considerable anti-Stalin anti-Soviet feeling in the eastern territories by its rigid insistence on treating the population as collective Untermensch to be presided over, tyrannized, enslaved, and brutalized by Nazi Herrenvolk. Within a year of Fall Barbarossa (Operation Barbarossa , the invasion of Russia), partisan activity had become a serious problem for the Germans, functioning in a way analogous to Allied air interdiction of German lines of communication in the west.160 228 The Second World War 229 The Nazi Blitz and Soviet Reaction At first, all went well. In particular, the Luftwaffe shattered the Soviet army airforce; 1800 Soviet airplanes had been destroyed on the first day alone, 4000 by the end of the first week. On the ground, the German blitzkrieg knifed through Russian defenders, and for a while it appeared like the heyday of German arms-an invasion of France writ large, as it were. The old Bolshevik Semyon Budenny ("a Slavic synthesis of Foch and Patton-with the talents of neither," in Alan Clark's memorable phrase) proved even less successful defending the southwestern front against Hider's generals than he had been against the Poles two decades before. Summer passed into fall, then winter approached, and the Nazi forces found themselves on the outskirts of Moscow. As Stuka pilot Paul-Werner Hozzel recollected: All of us were still sure of victory, even somewhat overbearing, not knowing what kind of winter was ahead of us. Our Generaloberst [von Richthofen) hovered in his Fieseler Storch. equipped with a radiophone, over the Russians as though they were flocks of sheep, directing single Stuka and Schlachtflieger units to targets spotted by him.161 There were, nevertheless, disquieting signs: the Russian tanks disengaging and heading eastward, hull-down on the horizon, beckoning German forces ever deeper; the never-ending resistance; and the continual appearance of the Soviet army air force, which like the Chinese air force half a world away, refused to be destroyed. Nazi Panzer gunner Karl Fuchs's letters to home offer an interesting mix of optimism and frustration (as well as revealing the malignant spirit of the Third Reich's military). On July 17, less than a month into the invasion, he wrote: Russian opposition is weak. . . . Our Air Force, in particular the Stuka attack bombers, actively support our efforts. Our comrades from the Air Force are topnotch guys.... Yesterday ... we saw our first women soldiers-Russian women , their hair shorn, in uniform! And these pigs fired on our decent German soldiers from ambush positions.162 On November 21, a Soviet tank crew brought the life of this hostile product of the Hider years to a close. The frustration with which German commanders regarded their Russian opponents as 1941 edged toward 1942 can be found in numerous memoirs and summary reports. One such document refers to Russian ground-attack aviation at the end of 1941, noting that "during the course of the winter batdes the Russians employed every last one of their aircraft against ground targets, 230 STRIKE FROM THE SKY billets, roads, traffic congestion, bridges, etc. They even used trainers and obsolete planes utterly unfit for combat flying."163 As noted earlier, the Soviets had profited tremendously from their experience in Spain and China, but the purges of Stalin had, to a great degree, negated any benefits that might have accrued...